100 Books Like Solar

I love this book because it changes the way I see the world every single time.

Powers writes with a patience that feels almost radical. I found myself slowing my breathing as I read, realizing how little I notice in the rush of daily life. I love how he blurs the line between human and nature, reminding me that we’re never outside the system—we are the system.

The Overstory humbles me, and because humility, to me, is where clarity begins.

I have never read a novel so close to prophecy.

Published in 1995, Parable starts in July 2024 amidst the election of an autocrat who, by the sequel Parable of the Talents, literally pledges to “make America great again.” I started my platform in 2015 in the same context.

This novel pulled me into its harrowing tale of how to survive civilizational collapse: the dismantling of systems, norms, and climate change that we are all currently going through.

The lesson is ultimately about embracing change, caring for and trusting each other in community, and coming up with our own ways of being together. So many of our ancestors have survived periods of collapse by the same principles. These ancestral lessons still guide me, and I believe are critical to surviving AI dystopia.

What makes a great novel? One that will be read forever? Top critics and commentators such as Harold Bloom and Nicholas Royle say the greatest fiction is written in a foreign language that somehow or other we understand. It is strange, unusual, uncanny, yet tells us profound truths about the human condition. The Rings of Saturn did even more for me; I thought it was miraculous. On the face of it, the narrator simply hikes through East Anglia. But he blends reportage, history, philosophy, mental ruminations, and much else in a melancholic commentary on life. Even translated from German, Sebald’s writing is mesmeric. Rings is a text that shapes your thinking in new ways. Sebald and his four peculiar ‘prose fictions’ would surely have won a Nobel prize had he not died in a car accident in 2001.

Before becoming a published writer, I was a lawyer litigating primarily large, multi-district environmental insurance coverage cases. I became familiar with the many ways by which we damage our precious natural resources, be it groundwater or soil or the air we breathe. Beginning with Rachel Carson, we have rich literature that speaks to the degradation of the planet, including the devastating changes wrought by global warming. The stories in this anthology speak to the physical and emotional topography of our current climate crisis, from a Sami woman who studies fish populations to a Wisconsin man contemplating the animals who make his trailer a portal to a world unsullied by humans. Fish & Water is a smart collection on a topic we ignore at our peril.

I will always find an excuse to read a classic literary tome about an unreliable narrator by the British seashore, partly because I know I’m in for a gut-punch of a landscape description. Even better when it’s garnished with a few—not too many, just enough—of those ultra-evocative lines that stop you in your tracks and make you go, “That’s exactly what that’s like!” But that’s not even the best part of this five-course meal of a book.

The story becomes increasingly surreal and disturbing. At each stage, Murdoch’s descriptions of the ocean landscape shift and change with the narrative, so the water increasingly looms in the background like a living character, apparently impersonal and even more deliciously horrible for it. 

Westlake is one of my favorite authors. His best-known works are his humorous John Dortmunder crime capers, but this book is a freestanding work with a brilliance all its own. Imagine an ordinary businessman sacked in corporate downsizing and desperate to land a new job…so desperate that he’ll literally kill the competition to get it.

I found it impossible to put down as I followed Burke Devore, someone not truly a “bad guy,” plan, prepare for, and carry out murder after murder. But what dazzled me most was how Westlake morphed a chilling crime spree into a grand metaphor for survival in the world of business.

I first read Lolita when I was 14 and have read it every few decades since, learning something new each time.

I love the first-person immediacy of it and the way it is a crime novel in reverse: the narrator is already imprisoned but not for the crime he describes. It is a love story turned on its head: what the narrator says is love is in fact abuse.

It is a road trip across the vastness of the US, like one I took when I was a student.

This starts with such a great premise: Douglas Petersen, a devoted but socially awkward biochemist, is blindsided when his wife announces she might leave him, but first, they’ll go on a "Grand Tour of Europe" with their 17-year-old son.

Douglas hopes this is his chance to fix the marriage, connect with his son, and rediscover the man he was supposed to be. But as the trip goes on, we start to realise that so often our vision of how life should be is based on fear of change and habit.

Mickelson’s Ghosts was the final book of famous novelist and equally famous writing teacher John Gardner, published a few months before his death in a motorcycle accident at the too-young age of 49. It tells the story of Peter Mickelson, a once-famous philosopher nearing the end of his career, and finding himself buying a run-down house he can't afford with his ex-wife and the I.R.S. breathing down his neck. Soon the rationalist philosopher finds himself living in a world of bad decisions, sex, hauntings and ghosts, and religious cults—a world where rationalism can’t save him from his own creeping madness and mortality. 

In a similar vein to the previous book, this novel focuses on a man whose life is spiralling out of control. His professional life begins to crumble, he nearly gets run over by a car and his two teenage children get themselves into angst-causing strife. What I love the most about this book is that it’s narrated in the second person by the main character Michael who’s essentially having a mid-life crisis breakdown. This can be hard to pull off, but it works here as it’s like Michael’s providing commentary on himself and his life as if observing someone else. It makes for some hilarious writing, despite the serious theme. The author shows that sometimes to really appreciate the highs of life, you need to hit rock bottom first.